Rian Johnson and Natasha Lyonne are in the studio, putting the finishing touches on the Season 2 finale of “Poker Face,” but it’s the final cut of this magazine story they’re worried about.
“It’s on you to edit,” says Lyonne in that dry, cigarette-crackled rasp. “And I’m so sorry for that.”
She’s apologizing because when you get her and Johnson (whom she calls “RiRi JJ”) in the same room, they can bounce off each other for minutes on end, hopscotching between topics — from John Candy to howling wolves to fax machines. “The fax machine is a very dangerous device,” says Lyonne at minute 13. By this point, I haven’t asked a single question about “Poker Face.”
The Peacock “howcatchem” series (as opposed to a “whodunit”) follows Charlie Cale, a de facto detective with an innate bullshit detector, who road trips across America, running from the mob and running into trouble. In a streaming era where even 30-minute comedies can morph into 80-minute dramas, “Poker Face” is unwavering in its commitment to form.
Each episode begins with a murder before Lyonne arrives on screen. Charlie always has a loose connection to the killing, bringing her into the victim’s orbit, but she never questions why she is constantly in close proximity to such gruesome death. Season 2 brings her to a funeral home, big box store and minor league baseball stadium. Charlie also visits an elementary school, but don’t worry: no children are harmed on “Poker Face.” Still, Johnson insists, “I feel like you can kill a kid before you can kill a dog.” (Don’t clip that.)
Love Film & TV?
Get your daily dose of everything happening in music, film and TV in Australia and abroad.
Each episode is also shot over 10 days — three on a soundstage in New York City and seven on location across the tri-state area. Under showrunner Tony Tost, the series managed to turn rural New York into Florida, but one idea that proved too logistically difficult was “doing shitty ‘Murder on the Orient Express,’” says Johnson, whose “Knives Out” movies pay homage to Agatha Christie. “It would have been a train mystery set on an Amtrak. It was a great script, but … trains are tough, man.”
If there’s one thing that’s clear from speaking with Johnson and Lyonne, it’s that they are obsessed with Hollywood. Throughout this hour-long interview, they name-drop 16 TV shows, 24 movies and 38 actors, many of whom appear on this season of “Poker Face.” In its second season, the show remains a magnet for guest stars, pulling in Cynthia Erivo to play sextuplets, John Mulaney as a dirty FBI agent and Kumail Nanjiani as a Joe Exotic-like gator guru.
“The fun thing about these guest roles is they’re relatively low stakes,” Johnson says. “And so, Kumail feels fine showing up and playing a character he can take a big, wild swing with and not worry about doing it for 10 more episodes.”
Unlike most murder-of-the-week series, “Poker Face” spends no time inside courthouses or police stations. “Thank goodness,” says Lyonne.
“This isn’t a procedural show. It’s a hangout show with Charlie,” Johnson adds. “We lean much more into the humor this season. Maybe it has something to do with the state of the world right now, but we just wanted to have a good time.”
Perhaps counterintuitively, the tight structure of the show allows for it to be quite stretchy. With a variety of writer-director-actor pairings, each episode is like a “mini movie,” Johnson says, where directors can pop in and take “creative ownership” over their episodes. And without the burden of a character backstory — very little is known about Charlie — the focus of each episode is entirely on the weekly mystery and bottled world-building.
“You can watch them in any order, and it’ll give the illusion Charlie is growing over the course of the season,” says Johnson.
The show’s resistance to big narrative arcs set it apart from other “premium” television. It also made it hard to pitch, says Johnson. “It was very difficult to sell the show. The episodic nature was a scary thing to everybody.”
“I was doing backflips when I read it,” Lyonne says of the original script. “I expected all the networks to feel the same, but a lot of people were scared by the idea that it wouldn’t be a completely serialized storyline. You know, Charlie Cale goes back into her childhood and tries to find a husband while she’s solving cases.”
The fact that Charlie doesn’t seem at all concerned about settling down or finding a partner is what makes the show somewhat radical, Lyonne says. Of course, there have always been male protagonists who are roamers unburdened by the trappings of romance, but “you weren’t allowed to be a female character with an inner monologue that was not related to finding the guy.”
“For a female character to be led by a philosophical concept, or an ethical soul journey, is a really bold act by one of our greatest living auteurs, who happens to be a guy,” Lyonne adds, tilting her head at Johnson. “It opens me up to doing so much shit that James Cagney or Humphrey Bogart are allowed to do, and that’s fucking awesome.”
Johnson has often said he planted the seedling for “Poker Face” after tearing through episodes of “Columbo,” “Quantum Leap” and “Highway to Heaven” during the pandemic. Like his COVID favorites, he wanted to make something old-school, led by a drifter hero with a big heart. But he wanted her to be a woman. Well, one specific woman.
“The idea that he’s seeing all of those dudes and then thinking, ‘God, Natasha would be perfect for this’ is really an act of feminism,” Lyonne says, without an ounce of snark. “In a weird way, it’s like saying, ‘OK it’s either Daniel Craig or Emma Thompson, but they’re sort of the same to me.’ That’s a rare gift for me to then be able to embody.”
As the second season of “Poker Face” trickles out, Lyonne is shifting her focus to another project: her feature directorial debut, which she wrote with Brit Marling. Titled “Uncanny Valley,” the movie follows a teenage girl whose grip on the real world unravels when she is consumed by a popular augmented reality video game. The project will blend traditional filmmaking with AI, courtesy of what she describes as an “ethical” model trained only on copyright-cleared data.
“It’s all about protecting artists and confronting this oncoming wave,” says Lyonne, emphasizing that it is not a “generative AI movie” but uses tools for things like set extensions.
When the film was announced in April, many on the internet did not see it that way.
“It’s comedic that people misunderstand headlines so readily because of our bizarro culture of not having reading comprehension,” says Lyonne. “Suddenly I became some weird Darth Vader character or something. That’s crazy talk, but God bless!”
“I’ve never been inside of one of those before,” Lyonne says of the vortex of backlash. “It’s scary in there, if anyone’s wondering. It’s not fun when people say not nice things to you. It grows you up a bit.”
She looks at Johnson, who, in 2017, felt the wrath of “Star Wars” fanboys when he subverted expectations on the critically acclaimed, yet divisive “Last Jedi.” His advice: shut off the noise and just make things. In a social media era where film and TV projects are judged before they’re even made, “any great art, during the process of making it, is going to seem like a terrible idea that will never work,” he says. “Anything great is created in a bubble. If it weren’t, it would never make it past the gestation period.”
For Lyonne, the chance to helm a feature film is the hard-earned result of a long career in showbiz, marked by early success with roles in “American Pie” and “But I’m a Cheerleader,” followed by more than a decade of scrapping for roles before landing on “Orange Is the New Black” and then co-creating and starring in “Russian Doll.”
“I’m very grateful for my success because I’ve been on the other side of the Hollywood tracks, and it’s a lot worse,” she says. “You call your agent a lot, and they say they’re not making movies right now. And you’re like, ‘I’ve seen the billboards, ma’am. It’s just not true! It’s OK to say they just don’t want me in it.’”
Now, billboards can’t get enough of Lyonne, whose red curls have draped over intersections and bus stops for the better part of a decade. Still, if there’s anything she’s learned over the course of her career, it’s that the real gratification is in the work, and who she chooses to do it with.
She’s about to gush more over Johnson, I can tell. But before she gets too sentimental, she starts hopscotching again, jumping from the Met Gala to Katy Perry memes to why she should probably zap the color from her iPhone screen.
As I ask my next question, Lyonne smiles. “Good luck editing.”
From Variety US